Taunggyi — One of the biggest mysteries in the history of the Shan
resistance was who had assassinated the Shan State Progress Party/Shan
State Army (SSPP/SSA)’s most colorful military leader Col Sam Möng (Zarm
Mong) in 1978 and why.

In early 1978, he, Lt-Col Pan Aung and a staff officer, Mao Khio, had
secretly visited the Shanland United Army (SUA) headquarters in Ban
Hintaek, Chiangrai province. They were never see again since, dead or
alive.

Lt-Col Pan Aung and Col Sam Möng

Later, other SSA leaders working in Thailand were also gunned down by assassins. They included:

Sao Hso Zeung

Sao Hseng Harn

Sao Boon Tai

Sao Zam Lake

Sao Zamka

To the SSA and many others, there was no question who was the main
culprit. All fingers pointed to the SUA and its leader Khun Sa. But why
did he do it? “Because it was the pre-condition for his release from
prison,” was the answer. But no one was able to present evidence to back
up their accusation.

Khun Sa, chief of Loimaw Homeguard, was imprisoned in Mandalay,
1969-74. He was released a year after his chief of staff, Zhang Suquan
aka Falang “Thunder”, staged a daring operation of kidnapping 2 Russian
doctors working in Taunggyi.

Zhang Suquan aka Falang

Khun
Sa, who later became commander-in-chief of the Mong Tai Army (MTA), the
merger between the SUA and the Shan United Revolutionary Army (SURA),
at first tried to shift responsibility by saying, “Yes, Sam Möng came to
Hintaek (now renamed Therd Tai). But why isn’t anyone asking who
brought them there?”

He later withdrew this stand and told the Shan monks who visited him
at his residence in Homong, “I promise I’ll disclose everything that had
happened when freedom comes.”

In the end, it wasn’t him but Falang who made the disclosure,
according to a former MTA leader who had surrendered together with him
in 1996. “Falang told us in 1995 that he and Lieng Zeun (Liang
Zhongying) had re-enlisted in the Kuomintang after Khun Sa was thrown in
jail by the Burmese,” he recounted. “It was during the Cold War and
without the KMT’s support, they feared the SUA wouldn’t have survived.
As a result, they were obliged to carry out instructions from Taiwan.”

One of them was the assassination of SSA leaders, which came about
after several members of Taiwan’s intelligence network in China were
taken into custody and executed by Chinese authorities. “They were said
to have received information written in Chinese from the SSA that had
seized a number of documents from a truck at a location between Tangyan
and Lashio,” Falang was quoted as saying.

A former senior SSA officer concurred. “It was Sao Sai Awng, an
officer from the 1st Brigade of Sao Hso Noom that had made the seizure,”
he said. “Nobody read Chinese, so we turned them over to the CPB
(Communist Party of China) that in turn turned them over to the
Chinese.”

(The names of the sources have been withheld to avert possible inconvenience to them.)

Khun Sa died in Rangoon in 2007 at the age of 73. His former sidekick
Falang followed him 4 years later after a brief visit to his homeland
Manchuria. He was 84.